The present invention relates to demonstration systems, particularly systems that demonstrate financial and financially related concepts and display financial and financially related information. Financially related concepts include insurance, tax advice, inventory processing and other, similar concepts; as used herein and in the claims which follow, the term "financial" also refers to such financially related concepts.
Many people are confused about investing and find it difficult to wade through vast amounts of financial information. Moreover, until a person feels that he (or she) grasps some of the basic principles of investing, that person is likely to keep all of his assets in one or two familiar investment vehicles. Often this lack of knowledge will subject the investor to unnecessary risks or, more likely, limit the growth potential of the investor's assets.
Education of the potential investor is the only way of combatting this lack of knowledge. Understanding financial concepts and information, however, necessarily involves working with numerical data, trends and concepts.
Many people find financial concepts and trends difficult to grasp. Columns of financial data are meaningless to many people. Thus previously known financial presentation systems have relied heavily on graphic representations of trends, such as the historical price of a stock.
Graphic representations of numerical data are difficult to create. There are software packages specifically designed to create graphs demonstrating financial concepts. However these products can be difficult to use and generally require each user (or small group of users) of the product to own or purchase expensive hardware.
Moreover, previously known financial graphics systems utilize only one screen. Thus such systems are not suited for use in a demonstration, as the person viewing the demonstration must also operate the demonstration. Furthermore, in such one-screen systems, certain aspects of the interface of the systems are often present on the display screen. These interface prompts, menus or "icons" are not part of the demonstration and detract from the demonstration by displaying distracting and unnecessary information to the person viewing the demonstration.
It is possible to avoid these problems by creating a simple linear presentation that needs only to be started by the operator or user. However, such simple systems lack the ability to interact with the user in a personalized manner. For example, the user of a linear presentation cannot review a portion of the demonstration that the user did not understand without having to review the entire demonstration. Similarly, the user of such a system cannot easily review one piece of information, such as historical price data of a particular investment vehicle, without wading through large amounts of irrelevant information. Thus the ability to interact personally with and direct the demonstration system contributes to the usefulness of the system, from both an educational and informational point of view.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system for demonstrating financial concepts which overcomes these disadvantages of previously known systems. Such a system must also be easy to operate, so as to permit the demonstrator easily to direct the demonstration without having to devote undue attention to the operation of the demonstration system itself.